The latest edition of Guardian Style includes contributions from many leading Guardian and Observer writers – from Hadley Freeman ("the critics' 'you' makes me want to poke my own eyes out so I can no longer read") to Martin Wainwright ("my proudest Guardian word-moment was getting 'wainwright' as a common noun into a piece about the Waggoners' Memorial at Sledmere in the East Riding"); from Gary Younge's mastery of the subjunctive mood to Zoe Williams's contention that "spelling mistakes spice things up a bit".

A couple I particularly like:

"I hate the way even problems are euphemised. They are now 'issues'. (Insurmountable problems have become 'challenges'.) 'Issues' now has far too many meanings. Imagine a parenting magazine that had a special edition on problem children – which ran into difficulties at the printers. Would these become the 'issue issues issue issues'? Probably." (Simon Hoggart)

"Few things disappoint me more than an intelligent, literate person actively choosing to write in a sloppy fashion. I don't care how busy you are – if you don't have time to punctuate, move away from the keyboard … I long to live in a world where omitting full stops from the ends of sentences is deemed a social faux pas akin to walking around with your penis hanging out of your trousers." (Ariane Sherine)

Here are a few more entries from Guardian Style, from M to R, with a final selection to come next week. If you don't want to wait that long you can, of course, buy a copy.

Meat Loaf

sings

meatloaf

doesn't sing – to quote "the Loaf" himself: "When I see my name spelt with one word, I want to slap and choke people. If you do that, you got to be a moron. It's on every poster, every album and every ticket as two words. If you spell it as one, you're an idiot. Bottom line"

moon walk

what Neil Armstrong did

moonwalk

what Michael Jackson did

Murphy's law

"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it"; also known as sod's law. Not to be confused with:

Muphry's law

"the editorial application of the better-known Murphy's law: If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written"

Native Americans

Geronimo was a Native American (not an American Indian or Red Indian); George W Bush is a native American

oxymoron

does not just vaguely mean self-contradictory; an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms are used in conjunction, such as bittersweet, "darkness visible" (Paradise Lost), "the living dead" (The Waste Land); one of Margaret Atwood's characters thought "interesting Canadian" was an oxymoron

pond

not a terribly witty way to refer to the Atlantic ("on the other side of the pond") which, in the words of one Guardian writer, is "smug, hackneyed, old-fashioned, inaccurate and generally crap"

quantum jump, quantum leap

cliches best avoided in any area other than physics (unless you are referring to the cult 70s band Quantum Jump or the cult 90s TV series Quantum Leap)

refute

this much abused word should be used only when an argument is disproved; otherwise contest, deny, rebut

Guardian Style (3rd edition), published by Guardian Books, is available with a 25% discount from the Guardian Bookshop